By Carlo Platella
In Canada Red Bull introduces a new mobile profile for the rear wing, but the attention is all on another area of the car. In Montreal the RB20 takes to the track with sensors mounted on the front suspension, telling the story of a team actually perplexed faced with the car’s difficulties on curbs and bumps in the asphalt. After the defeat at Monte Carlo, it has now been decided in Milton Keynes to take the issue very seriously.
Correlation problems
During FP1, Max Verstappen’s RB20 ran with white circular stickers mounted on the front suspension pull-rod rods. These are optical references similar to those used for the rear wing, useful for monitor abnormal pull-rod flexions through the cameras mounted on the nose. In fact, each shaft naturally tends to deform, but the suspicion at Red Bull is that the deformation occurs with different extensions and methods than expected.
The test conducted in Montreal confirms what Helmut Marko feared to the German press after the Monaco Grand Prix: “The underlying problem is that the correlation between the simulator and the track doesn’t work. In the simulator we pass the curbs without problems, here instead the car bounces like a kangaroo”. In the same weekend, Max Verstappen also painted a picture in which Red Bull was not yet aware of what was behind the problem: “First of all we need to understand what it is, if we knew we would have already solved it. We have had this problem since 2022but in recent years we had such an advantage that we hid it a little”.
Check on the track
Red Bull’s goal is to understand why the RB20 absorbs bumps worse than expected. The precious tools available in the factory to study mechanical behavior are: dynamic test benches, where the car is hoisted onto four platforms, each driving a wheel and the respective suspension unit. However, this is a limited verification, as it does not take into account other forces at play such as the accelerations encountered during travel and obviously the aerodynamic load. This is also why the track remains the best possible test bed, especially the Canadian one, full of curbs and rough edges on which to test the behavior of the RB20.
